One two three four three four threeeeee
March 30, 2004 3:00 PM   Subscribe

The Sound of Mathematics Mathematical functions whose output have been jammed into MIDI files. The results are disturbingly musical.
posted by Mwongozi (8 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
shouldn't MeFi just filter out geocities links before they hit the front page?
posted by badstone at 3:13 PM on March 30, 2004


Well, you know GeoCities is. Google cache to the rescue...
posted by moonbird at 3:15 PM on March 30, 2004


well, sort of to the rescue... since it won't pull up the midis, it's probably too late. it's dead, jim.
posted by moonbird at 3:18 PM on March 30, 2004


Good stuff....those interested might also be amused or transfixed by Ken Takusagawa's attempt to listen to the values of the Riemann-Siegel Z function:

"I was inspired from the visual appearance of these plots to try to produce a sound file of the zeta function along the critical line. A similar attempt was made by Robert Munafo .

Therefore, the real motivation for this project is artistic. I just wanted to hear what it sounded like (and to take advantage of a computational resource that I would not likely have again any time in the near future) . I was not out to discover any deep mathematical revelations, although the tabulations may be useful to other mathematicians for that endeavor. I am not attempting to solve any particularly difficult or interesting parallel computer programming problem; the parallelization implemented was of the "embarrassingly" variety and relatively trivial.

To borrow a quote from George Mallory, I performed this calculation of the Z function "because it's there."


Or perhaps one might look for Sagan's elusive circle somewhere downstream in the expansion of pi, eh?
posted by fold_and_mutilate at 3:21 PM on March 30, 2004


MusiNum may blow your mind.
posted by the fire you left me at 3:28 PM on March 30, 2004


Metmath Music Page
Proofs from set theory converted into music.
Includes Russel's Paradox, Zorn's Lemma, and 2+2=4.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 3:28 PM on March 30, 2004


This is fun. Douglas Adams would have appreciated this -- there was a very enjoyable section in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency where a character built a function like this into a spreadsheet program.
posted by Zonker at 4:47 PM on March 30, 2004


The king of musical numerics is Tom Johnson. Listen to an excerpt from Multiplication Table from a counting record called Music for 88. He was the avant garde music critic for The Village Voice in the 70s (he was the first to name it "minimalism") and his columns are documented in a wonderful book called The Voice of New Music.
posted by ubueditor at 6:15 PM on March 30, 2004


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